Designing morphology of separated phases in multicomponent liquid mixtures

Abstract

Phase separation of multicomponent liquid mixtures plays an integral part in many processes ranging from industry to cellular biology. In many cases the morphology of coexisting phases is crucially linked to the function of the separated mixture, yet it is unclear what determines morphology when multiple phases are present. We developed a graph theory approach to predict the topology of coexisting phases from a given set of surface energies (forward problem), enumerate all topologically distinct morphologies, and reverse engineer conditions for surface energies that produce the target morphology (inverse problem).

6 pages, 4 figures + Supplemental Material (5 pages, 4 figures). Videos available at http://www.princeton.edu/~akosmrlj/papers/phase_separation_design/videos/

References in corpus (3)

• Thermodynamic Approach to Phase Coexistence in Ternary Phospholipi-Cholesterol Mixtures
• Effect of Elasticity on Phase Separation in Heterogeneous Systems
• Physicochemical Hydrodynamics of Droplets out of Equilibrium: A Perspective Review

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Evolved interactions stabilize many coexisting phases in multicomponent liquids
• Liquid demixing in elastic networks: cavitation, permeation, or size selection?
• Theory and simulation of multiphase coexistence in biomolecular mixtures
• Emergence of multiphase condensates from a limited set of chemical building blocks
• Phase separation dynamics in deformable droplets
• Enhanced stability and chaotic condensates in multi-species non-reciprocal mixtures
• Predicting the morphology of multiphase biomolecular condensates from protein interaction networks
• A Unified Theory of Free Energy Functionals and Applications to Diffusion
• Programmable phase behavior in fluids with designable interactions
• Thermodynamically Consistent Phase-Field Theory Including Nearest-Neighbor Pair Correlations Explains Failure of Mean-Field Reasoning
• Chemical reaction motifs driving non-equilibrium behaviors in phase separating materials
• The intertwined physics of active chemical reactions and phase separation
• Catalysis-Induced Phase Separation and Autoregulation of Enzymatic Activity
• Ensemble inequivalence in the design of mixtures with super-Gibbs phase coexistence
• Controlling biomolecular condensates via chemical reactions